The Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon died a
year ago, on August 8, 2018. This article honors the life and legacy of this
outstanding black woman.
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| Katie Geneva Cannon (1950~2018) |
Who
Was Katie Cannon?
Katie
Cannon was born in 1950 in Kannapolis, North Carolina, the town that grew up
around Cannon Manufacturing, the textile mill that began production in 1908 and
soon became the world’s largest producer of sheets and towels.
That
company, which in 1928 became Cannon Mills, was founded by J.W. Cannon
(1852~1921), and Katie was a descendant of slaves who were owned by his family
at the time of his birth.
In 1974, Katie Cannon was the first
African American woman to be ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. She also
was the first black woman to earn both the M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees from Union
Theological Seminary in New York.
Through
the years, Cannon taught in several universities and seminaries/divinity
schools. From 1993~2001 she was a professor in the Department of Religion at
Temple University.
June’s and my daughter
Karen, who is now a professor at the University of Arizona and head of the
Department of Religious Studies and Classics, did her graduate
work at Temple. During her Ph.D. studies there, Cannon was one of her main professors
and her dissertation advisor.
(I
was happy to have had the privilege of meeting and talking with Katie during that
time.)
Cannon
finished her career as Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Presbyterian
Seminary in Richmond (Va.), where she taught from 2001 until her death
last year.
The
Womanist Ethics of Katie Cannon
Alice
Walker, best known for her award-winning book The Color Purple,
coined the term womanist in her 1983 book In Search of Our
Mothers’ Garden: Womanist Prose. Katie Cannon soon began popularizing that
term in theological circles.
Cannon’s
first major book was Black Womanist Ethics (1988), and she became the
first theologian to use the term womanist widely. (She accepted Walker’s
definition of womanist as a black feminist or feminist of color.)
Early in her book, Cannon
states:
Black women are the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society. The structure of the capitalist political economy in which Black people are commodities combined with patriarchal contempt for women has caused the Black woman to experience oppression that knows no ethical or physical bounds (p. 4).
That
is a compelling statement of the challenge Katie Cannon spent her lifetime
combatting—and her efforts helped to make American society better than it was thirty
years ago, although there is still much that needs to be done.
Tributes
to Katie Cannon
In
April of last year, the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership was
inaugurated at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Alice Walker (b. 1944) was the
guest speaker at the inaugural ceremonies.
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| Katie Cannon and Alice Walker (4/18) |
In
January 2020, the first issue of the new Wabash Center Journal on Teaching (formerly Teaching Theology and Religion) will include a special section
on Katie Cannon's contributions to the development of womanist pedagogy.
Our daughter Karen was one of Cannon’s
former students asked to write a brief article for that special
edition. Here is how she began her tribute to her graduate school professor:
Katie Geneva Cannon’s life and legacy stand as a call to grapple with the injustices of the past and present while creatively constructing previously unimaginable futures.
With
Karen and many others, I am still sad because of Cannon’s passing last year at
the age of 68. Still, there is much to celebrate because of Katie’s active
efforts to combat racism and sexism.
American
society has been made better because of how Katie Cannon creatively confronted those
challenges—and taught her students to do the same.
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